Over the last three decades, Burkina Faso's poorest farmers have produced food for half a million people by restoring some 300,000 hectares (741,000 acres) of degraded land with innovative techniques to conserve water and soil, according to a report on Wednesday [Oct. 8].

The UK-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) think tank said Burkina Faso's subsistence farmers were leading the fight against climate change in the West African country, which is prone to severe droughts and increasingly erratic rainfall.

Amanda Lenhardt, research officer at the ODI, said farmers on the edge of the Sahel belt in Burkina Faso's Central Plateau region had made major strides in offsetting the worst impacts of climate change in "one of the world's most fragile areas."

"While malnutrition and poverty remain major problems in Burkina Faso, the fact that farmers can still produce food during extreme droughts has helped the region to avoid famine," Lenhardt told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"The reclamation of unproductive lands in such a climatically vulnerable region by resource-constrained farmers is an achievement by any standards," she said by telephone from Ouagadougou.

Landlocked Burkina Faso ranks 181 out of 187 countries in the U.N. Human Development Index, and remains one of the world's poorest nations.

The ODI said the restoration of up to 10 percent of Burkina Faso's arable land in the Central Plateau region was even more remarkable considering that a third of the world's productive land was experiencing degradation.

Lenhardt said it was vital that restoring degraded land with sustainable techniques took off in other regions of Burkina Faso, given the importance of agriculture, which accounts for almost 35 percent of the country's gross domestic product and employs 85 percent of the population.

Lenhardt said information about the ever-improving sustainable techniques, which include using ditches to collect water, had been disseminated by farmers' groups and national organizations to great effect.